I’ve got a small list of periodic things to Google on about once every three months, including “minolta maxxum dslr,” mostly hoping for some entry-level love from those people, who made my film SLR (the Maxxum 5). Some time in the last few weeks, they formally announced the Maxxum 5D, the DSLR version of my film SLR.

It comes in at a decent price point if you buy with no lens, and it’s compatible with my existing lenses, which is the thing that makes it worth looking at. I’ve got a 200mm zoom (so-so, but it gets me up on top of things) and a 50mm prime (which is a pretty nice lens for informal portraits). Neither are super-nice, but they represent an investment I could keep using with a digital camera from Minolta.

I wish I could afford one when they hit in September, but I’m content to wait a while and let them slide down in price. My Powershot G5 has its issues, but in normal shooting conditions I don’t miss much with it. Funny, though, how my conception of “snapshot camera” has slid ever upward in the past few years. My first digital snapshot cam, a Canon Powershot S10, was a pale shadow of the G5, but it didn’t take long for me to bonk my head on the limitations of the G5, which is slowly being churned under by much less expensive and more compact cameras with better pretense/performance ratios.

It’s mostly nice knowing that Minolta’s finally putting product into my end of the market so I can finally stop thinking about putting my kit up on CraigsList, where it wouldn’t fetch what it’ll be worth to me hooked up to a DSLR some day.